A number of things are operating to our advantage in our fight against
the would-be slaveholders of the 21st century -- particularly the ones
holed up in Washington, D.C. As I've written previously, the primary
weapon being used by our enemies is the "American KGB" (the correct
Russian translation of "Homeland Security"). One of the weapons
wielded by the American KGB is the Total Information Awareness (TIA)
program, which the KGB envisions to be the "permanent record" with
which your grade-school principle threatened you.

I've previously pointed out that the only moral response to the
FedGov's demands to create a police state in this fashion is non-
compliance. We are also helped by the proliferation of spam
(unsolicited junk e-mail) which acts as chaff in our enemies' radar.

There are also a number of things that the average individual can do
to thwart the system:

- Firstly, there is absolutely no doubt that the hacker/cracker crowd
is going to consider TIA a formal challenge. It will be under CONSTANT
attack from every distant corner of the globe. Support such efforts:
sponsor PayPal or E-Gold accounts for hackers, help them in their
work, support them any way you can. They will end up being some of the
biggest heroes in our War for Freedom.

- Support the new technologies that will appear designed specifically
to counter-act tracking on the Internet and to feed bogus data to TIA.

Let's imagine you went to www.xxx.com. Under the American KGB, this
fact would be tracked and noted in TIA. The next time the KGB wants to
sting one of your neighbors (a la Randy Weaver), they might threaten
to expose the fact that you like porn to your children unless you
complied with their demands.

There are ways to spoof such information, and hackers will make these
programs available. Your destination might be altered to look as
though you'd been perusing nothing but
http://www.tia.gov/how_to_be_a_good_little_automaton_droid.html. As
such spoofing programs become available, install and use them. Offer
the creators of such software all the moral and financial support that
you can.

- Since everyone -- KGB members included -- will be tracked from
cradle to grave, hackers will no doubt seek to make public interesting
information about bureaucrats.

Perhaps it will become public knowledge that (as a purely hypothetical
example) President Shrub likes to post to alt.sex.schoolgirl.bukkake
under the alias "subslut-12".

Use and support the technologies that make such information public.

- Use PGP encryption on EVERYTHING. Your e-mail, your data files,
everything. Remember, any night the KGB could bash down your door and
take your computers. You don't want them to find anything remotely
incriminating. PGP and a 2048-bit (or higher) key are the answer.

In addition to purely electronic measures, there are more concrete
tactics that one can adopt. Given the fact that TIA seeks to monitor
every single financial transaction by every individual in the country
from cradle to grave, it is not reactionary to contemplate the
following:

- Revert to buying things with cash. I know it will be an enormous
pain in the behind. Unfortunately, the choice is between having your
transaction tracked simply by following the electronic trail or not
having it tracked with cash.

- Operate as much as possible in the black or gray market. By this, I
mean pay your plumber in cash, accept cash so as to avoid making a
record of the transaction, and so forth. The goal is to move as much
of the economy off of that which is being officially tracked and
inspire non-compliance with the system.

- Ultimately they're going to cook up a way to track cash. It will
probably occur to them that everyone should have a Federally-issued
driver's license/debit card/biometric ID in place of any other kind of
currency.

Moving to forms of barter could be a useful step. See if your plumber
will accept silver or gold coins (just rounds, not numastic coins).
And not American Eagle rounds, either -- just generic .999 fine silver
and gold minted privately. If not that, what about long distance
cards, gift certificates from local merchants, or other portable items
with value?

- One might even consider giving up banking entirely. Certainly it's a
pain in the behind of gargantuan proportions and an economic loss to
boot. But where your financial data resides with a bank, it will
eventually reside with the KGB.

Finally, there are areas of physical security that are worthy of
consideration:

- Think about setting up a "dead man switch" on your computer, so that
failure to correctly respond after a specified time period will cause
a low-level hard drive format. If the American KGB seizes your
equipment and tortures your PGP passphrase out of you, better that the
computer self-destructs.

- If you're a reloader, think seriously about putting together and
marketing an ACTUAL self-destruct mechanism, something that can be
easily tripped to cause selected items to be destroyed.

Goodness knows what art, literature, and property will become illegal
under the American KGB. You might find that having your supply of
illicit cigarettes turn into a pile of carbon would be a good thing.

Even with a low-level format of your hard drive, it can be possible to
recover data from it. ISC2 (the consortium backing my Certified
Information Systems Security Professional certification) recommends
physical destruction of hard disk followed by immersion of the
platters in acid.

The basic point is: non-electronic transactions can't be tracked. Your
plumber likes cash and operates on the gray market RIGHT NOW because a
cash transaction means he doesn't have to report the income to the
IRS. If he could get all his payments in cash, he'd be thrilled. Adopt
his attitude.

The American FedGov is ultimately going to collapse. It will do so via
one of two ways: massive economic depression caused by government
tampering in the free market, or massive non-compliance in the system
itself.

The most important thing you can do is: THINK FREE.

If you wake up in the morning and say, "Today, I'm free. I will do
whatever I like so long as I do not initiate force against another
human being," it's ASTOUNDING how your horizons broaden. You realize
that you actually have a CHOICE about whether or not to cooperate with
the American KGB.

Free individuals have choices. Slaves don't. Free individuals,
280,000,000 strong, are capable of coming up with ways around every
single draconian attempt to enslave us that the American KGB can
devise.

William Stone, III is a computer nerd (RHCE, CCNP, CISSP) and
philosopher of the Zero Aggression Principle from McCook Lake, South
Dakota. He seeks the Libertarian Party's nomination for the 2004
Senate race in South Dakota.

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